Headphones strongly advised!

A journey through the cycles of cosmic birth and rebirth with the coming of light and descent into darkness, with subtle hints of eggs throughout. The viewer is taken through a process which begins and ends in the same place and can continue indefinitely, signifying how the information producing Bang will eventually be followed by the information consuming Crunch, allowing for another Bang and so on. The start of the second cycle is slightly different from the first, offering hope that the Bang-Crunch cycle is different each time and that perhaps one Bang will produce a means of escape, preserving that universe’s information forever and ending the tyranny of circular entropy. The only thing we can be sure of as we leave the cosmic process to restart is that this has not yet happened.

We took inspiration visually from Allures by Jordan Belson, The Wizard of Speed and Time by Mike Jittov, and 50s Christmas trees. Our implementation of Allures-like aspects was specifically starting with an exploration of light and motion using the first two minutes of Belson’s work in which isolated islands of light move in a cyclical pattern. The overall aim of our piece is to extend this cycle to a larger setting of life and cosmology. The Wizard of Speed and Time’s scene of cinematic equipment coming to life in a stop motion is symbolic of the life given by cinema to ideas and images which would otherwise be still and lifeless. The 50s Christmas Tree lighting was similar to many other media events in that period where a live xylophone would play as lights came on sequentially.
The sound is taken conceptually from the cosmic microwave background, although at a pitch suggestive of the last days of the hopeful cosmos in which the acceleration of the Bang reaches its maximum and begins to decrease, giving the inhabitants of the cosmos the precise date of the Crunch, when all information is consumed and a new universe is ready to be reborn.

By Rebecca Marcus, Katherine Wang, Xavier Apostol, Paul Calhoun, Haobo Wang